One of the vital, glorious things about the history of the American people is our democratic traditions. Our country emerged as part of the historical struggle against medievalism, and, more than 200 years ago, took up the banners of equality and democracy. Despite the obstacles created by the reactionary classes – despite the imposition of slavery, the armed conquest of the Southwest and other territories, despite Jim Crow and the whole system of discrimination and inequality imposed on the peoples – the American people, gathering together the democratic and progressive traditions of the peoples from many lands, always fought for the realization in practice of equal rights for everyone.

Today, when the drive to “increase the international competitiveness” of U.S. capitalism is accompanied by an intensification of discrimination of all kinds and when the monopoly capitalist class is trying to erase the victories of the historical struggles for equal rights, the working class must carry forward its great democratic heritage to the point of coming out as a class-for-itself, organized in its own political party and independent political movement, with the aim of winning the battle for democracy by gaining the political power.

Thus it is no surprise that today the capitalist-class is waging an all out political and ideological war to de-politicize the workers and prevent the development of their self-conscious, independent organization and movement. People are told in a million and one ways that they really have no independent political role to play. People are told that the working class is a backward class – a slave class – incapable of thinking and acting independently on the basis of its own aims and agenda.

This claim is a complete denial of reality.

Today, every day and every minute, the American working class and people are in motion. At the workplace, workers are continually in struggle against capitalist exploitation – fighting against wage and benefit cuts and winning; fighting against downsizing and winning; fighting against restructuring and winning; fighting against contracting out and winning; fighting against privatization and winning; fighting against the substitution of part-time employees for full-time and winning; etc. So too, over the last several years, large-scale movements have emerged to defend social programs such as social security and public education. Ever-wider sections of people are opposing the government's aggressive foreign policy and war programs. Many struggles are breaking out to defend democratic rights against unprecedented attacks by the Obama administration. So too, many activists are already linking the demand for cancellation of the debt with the more generalized movement against the capitalist “free trade” program of
economic penetration and domination of the entire world.

Yet more, many people have come forward and been inspired by the Workers Party and its revolutionary battle against the capitalist propaganda which defames the workers as “backward;” which tries to erase the memory of all the historical and present-day battles for enlightenment and emancipation; which tells the people to negate the pure aspirations of their hearts and to suppress their vision for a new society.

Showing complete contempt and opposition to the growing class consciousness of the workers and people, the labor aristocracy and opportunism, with Bernie Sanders as the figurehead, is cynically trying to cash in on the term “socialist” as part of the Democratic Party strategy to keep peace activists, trade unionists, and others under their tutelage. At the moment in history when the false promises and deceptive tactics of the capitalist politicians are more exposed than ever, the heads of the AFL-CIO and the trends of social democracy and modern revisionism are busier than ever trying to create the illusion that the Democrats “may change,” that the working class and people must “wage the good fight inside the Democratic Party.”

It is very interesting to note that the very people who wish to keep the movement under the tutelage of the bourgeois state and bourgeois politics are the same ones who never stop cursing the people. This election cycle there is even a big campaign to claim that, rather that getting media air time only because of the billions and billions of dollars spent on his electoral bid, Donald Trump is really a representative of a “popular movement” in America. Of course the top officialdom of the labor aristocrats (especially the AFL-CIO) who promote this Big Lie, do not explain why the masses of people, oppressed and exploited in social and economic life, would suddenly want to fortify their exploitation and oppression, only to remain at the receiving end.

Of course, the labor aristocracy does not want to admit that its politics originates with its position on the Board of Directors of various corporations and participation in “tripartite” cooperation with the government and big business. Nor do similar stratum placed at the head of other sections by monopoly capital – in the women's movement, in the oppressed minority communities, etc. – want to admit their political origins.

These stratum work to suppress the political independence of the workers. This is not a new lesson. As has been pointed out time and time again, the atmosphere fostered by opportunism is just as stifling and apolitical as the atmosphere created by the monopoly-controlled media. Genuine political discussion is ruled out of order and the thought and action of the people is kept within the narrowest possible framework. Not only do the opportunists create every illusion in the capitalist system and capitalist state. When push comes to shove – when a real crisis develops and the interests of capital are threatened – opportunism openly embraces the aims of the capitalists themselves. Thus, for example, the leaders of the AFL-CIO embrace the program of “increasing the competitiveness of U.S. capitalism.” Similarly, at key moments such as the wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and Iraq, many “leaders” of the peace movement openly adopt the chauvinist positions of U.S. imperialism.

The experience of the Workers Party is this marginalization and de-politicalization of people is only broken by giving expression to the independent class aims of the workers. The Party's work is helping create the subjective conditions necessary to consolidate the political independence and organization of the workers. The Workers Party calls on everyone to join with us in using the election period to denounce the Democrats and Republicans for their attacks on the people. We must all involve ourselves in a broad political campaign to rally people around a genuinely modern definition of rights which includes recognition of the people's fundamental economic rights and demands that society guarantee the means necessary for people to exercise all their rights in real life. Such a concrete program of solutions recognizes that in the final analysis, the modern demand for equality – for equal economic, political and social rights for all human beings is the demand for the abolition of social classes.

Separate and Unequal

What the Candidates Have in Mind for the Schools

Education “reform” has developed into a major part of the anti-social offensive of the Democrats and Republicans. Just what kind of “reform” are these political representatives of big capital carrying out? The two parties are tearing apart and dismantling our system of public education.

For several years now, politicians, education officials and the monopoly-controlled media have kept up a barrage of propaganda cursing the public schools and blaming them for just about every problem – from drugs and violence to the economic difficulties facing the capitalist class. The U.S. Department of Education and the state and local capitalist politicians cynically curse the teachers, the students, the parents and the very concept of public education in order to prepare conditions for further undermining the schools.

But let's take a moment to go back to the basics.

Our nationwide system of public schools from kindergarten through high school is one of the great achievements of our country and people. Beginning in the days of British colonial rule, American people came out against the feudal system which reserved education as an exclusive privilege for the rich. The colonists insisted that education was a public responsibility and struggled to create the “common school” system to guarantee equality in education for everyone. Every generation of Americans have continued and extended this struggle for the right to education.

Today, the government is refusing to fulfill its most elementary responsibility when it undermines the education of the youth. The government's own studies admit that smaller classes are a key to quality education, yet school officials – especially in working class and minority areas – are laying off teachers left and right. Schools often crowd twice the recommended number of students into classes. So too, under Arnie Duncan, the U.S. Department of Education has formally denied all responsibility for the federal government to be more than an “emergency response system” for school funding. The Obama administration admits to spending more than 8 times as much on the Department of Defense budget as it spends on the Department of Education budget. The result has been that the burden falls more than ever on local communities to fund public schools.

Were there problems and shortcomings in the public schools before aggressive funding for privatization began during the Obama administration? Yes. For example, even while the government itself admitted that 2/3 of our public school buildings were in serious disrepair, the government refused to make the investments needed to bring these schools up to the minimum level of safety and repair. Thus, then as now, it was the very government officials who were attacking the public schools who were responsible for all of their problems.

Privatization uses public funds to create a few elite institutions which are free of government oversight and public accountability and which can serve to train managers, technicians and professionals. The “public” and for-profit charter systems directly drain vital funds from the public schools treasury, further eroding schools for the majority. The voucher system also authorizes public funds to be handed over to privately run institutions. Genuinely public schools are funded without a private middle-man.

The immediate result of this entire bipartisan program is to intensify the system of dual schools. The capitalists want the government to spend even larger sums in the future on a few schools chartered to train technicians, professionals and managers for the capitalist class. They want this even while condemning the majority of working class and minority youth to overcrowded and run-down schools which serve only to “discipline” the youth in prison-like “holding centers.” Just as Obama's so-called “overhaul” of the No Child Left Behind Act has been a program for replacing our country's system of public schools with a system of charter and voucher schools, Sanders, Clinton, Trump, Rubio, Cruz and Kasich all promise to do the same.

In opposition to the government's program of slashing investments in the public schools and intensifying the dual system of separate and unequal schools we must step up our struggle to demand:

– No More School Closings!

– No More Teacher and Staff Layoffs!

– No More Privatization and Charter Schools!

– No More Curriculum Cuts!

The workers and people must wage many struggles to force the government to protect and expand investments in the public schools. Rights, such as the right to a modern education, necessarily include the responsibility of society to set aside at least a portion of the total social product and devote it to guarantying the economic rights of the people in practice.

To guide the on-going popular struggles in defense of the public schools and against the entire capitalist program of slashing social investments and privatizing public services, we must merge these struggles into a common front. To make our movement pro-active and find permanent solutions to the problems confronting us, requires that, in the course of fighting for change, we continually politicize ourselves and our movement. This means creating an atmosphere in which people can get information and zero in on the root problems. It means getting actively involved in creating new space in which people can put forward their own aims and agenda. It means building up the mass workers' press and using it as a tool to mobilize public opinion against the reactionary program of the capitalists. It means uniting people around a the program of economic rights, democratic renewal, a democratic foreign policy and socialism and carrying out the theoretical and ideological work needed to rally ever-wider sections of the people.

To win, the people must organize themselves independent of and in opposition to the parties of the rich. We must popularize the program of the Workers Party in order to build up the organized strength and active struggles of the people capable of staying the hand of the capitalist exploiters and their twin political parties. The consciousness of the workers and people can only develop in the course of sharp and irreconcilable struggle against the ideology and politics of the capitalist class.

The Working Class Carries Forward the Banner of Democracy

Below we outline 9 initial theses or conclusions in order to provide readers with some background information on the development and present-day features of the capitalist state and of the struggles of the working masses for democratic liberties and equality.

1) The American War of Independence against British colonialism was indeed a great democratic, revolutionary movement through which the people gained national independence, overthrew various feudal relations and established a secular state guaranteeing various democratic liberties. But even at this time, the political leadership of the revolution, remaining in the hands of merchant and industrial capitalists as well as the Southern slavocracy, fought to secure the state power for themselves precisely in order to guarantee their property rights. The Constitution of 1789 not only sanctioned slavery and declared permanent war on the Native Indians but also completely disenfranchised women; in addition, even the bourgeois democratic liberties of small farmers, artisans and workers were severely restricted.

Most fundamentally the Constitution of 1789 was a constitution guaranteeing the rights of private property in the means of production and concentrating all state power in the hands of the big merchants, industrialists. and slaveowners. The principal function of the new state power was to maintain the “natural division” of society between “property-holders” and the great mass of the property-less population and to use force and state violence to protect the rights of the capitalist property owners.

2) The existence of slavery in the South retarded the development of capitalism and meant that the bourgeois democratic revolution remained uncompleted. Between 1787 and the Civil War, a dominant feature of American political life was the struggle between the two competing social systems – the capitalist system of the North and the slave system in the South. The northern capitalists were compelled both by the pressure of the slave revolts and the democratic movements of the workers as well as by the economic demands of capitalism to wage the Civil War. But the whole course of events preceding, during and after the Civil War showed that the capitalists fought solely to insure the domination of their system and not for the genuine freedom and emancipation to which the slaves aspired. As soon as the power of the slavocracy was broken, as soon as the northern industrialists and bankers were guaranteed complete control over the state apparatus and the was way cleared for the unfettered development of capitalism, the capitalists resurrected the overthrown slaveowners, created a counter-revolutionary alliance with them and through armed force ruthlessly crushed the democratic movement of the black masses and imposed a semi-feudal and inhuman apartheid system on them.

Furthermore, by this time the capitalist state had also waged the Mexican-American war, annexed huge parts of Mexico and reduced the Mexican and Indian population in the Southwest to status of a conquered peoples.

Thus, the oppression of nationalities is one of the pillars upon which capitalism and the capitalist state in the U.S. grew up. Subsequent history has shown that the democratic aspirations and demands of the black people, the Mexican Americans, the Native Indians and others remain unfulfilled and that even to achieve minor reforms on these questions the oppressed national minorities and the working class have had to wage unremitting, revolutionary struggles against the capitalist class and the capitalist state.

3) With the entire continent opened for the unfettered development of capitalism, with the state power completely in the hands of the northern industrialists, the capitalist state turned its attention to genocidal wars against Indians and the usurpation of their lands and hereditary rights, to enriching the big capitalists through unprecedented land give-aways and governmental swindles and to suppressing the rising working class movement.

The real face of the capitalist state is fully revealed in its struggle to protect the rights of the capitalist property-owners against the working class and its struggles for genuine (economic and social) equality. From the first emergence of the working class movement the capitalists used the entire force of the state machine to suppress even the most elementary economic struggles of the workers – struggles for higher wages and better working conditions, struggles to organize trade unions, etc. The state militias and the standing army were built up, especially in the latter half of the 19th century, to suppress the economic movements of the workers; martial law was and remains a frequent weapon used by the capitalist state against the workers' strike struggles and trade union movement.

The capitalist state has resorted to even more brutal measures in its attacks against the political movement of the workers and especially in trying to prevent the working class from organizing and building its own political party. Special measures outlawing the working class political party have been imposed many times as in the “anti-socialist and sedition laws” during WWI or the all-out anti-communist crusade after WW II. Tens of thousands of working class political activists have been subjected to imprisonment, torture, deportation, murder, etc. An extensive political police operates through the state machine trying to infiltrate and prevent the political organization of the workers through any and every means including secret assassinations. Many laws have been put on the books and applied in practice, making it a crime to espouse the independent program and ideology of the working class. The capitalist state has tried to outlaw the propagation of socialism and Marxism-Leninism.

4) As a result of the rapid concentration and centralization of capital, American capitalism reached the stage of monopoly and imperialism even before the turn of the 20th century. And, as Lenin has correctly shown, politics follows economics; the emergence and domination of monopoly capital in the economic life of the country has led to an ever-greater reliance on reaction and violence by the capitalist state. With the rise of monopoly capital and imperialism, the capitalist state became an instrument for wars and colonization. This aggressive foreign policy was accompanied by an unrestrained chauvinism and increased repression at home, in order to maintain a “quiet rear” for U.S. imperialism. World War I, during which U.S. imperialism tried to hide its program of colonial expansion under the signboard of “making the world safe for democracy,” was accompanied by wholesale repression against the working class movement and against the socialist and communist parties in the U.S.. A ferocious propaganda campaign was initiated at that time trying to equate Americanism and patriotism with capitalism and attempting to outlaw and force underground the working class and revolutionary movement.

By the end of WW II, U.S. imperialism had stepped into the shoes of Hitler, appointed itself the savior of world capitalism and become the biggest colonial and neo-colonial power. U.S. imperialism declared open and permanent war on the national liberation movements, socialism and the working class movement throughout the world. Since that time, the U.S. state has carried out nearly 100 wars of aggression, established its military bases in dozens of countries and on all the oceans and continents and tried to blackmail and dominate the entire world with its huge arsenal of nuclear and conventional weapons.

Similarly, McCarthyism was the declaration of war against the working class and communist movement at home. The Communist Party and Marxism-Leninism were made illegal. Any and every working class organization came under attack and a huge repressive apparatus was established for suppressing the working class and popular struggles. Today the U.S. capitalist state maintains some 5 million men under arms and continues to carry out an all-around process of fascistization. Militarization has become a permanent feature of the economy and the entire life of society.

5) A characteristic feature of present-day capitalist politics in the U.S. is that while the capitalists do create unofficial paramilitary, “ultra right” and openly fascist groups, they rely principally on the state machine and the 2 big capitalist parties – the Republicans and Democrats – to carry forward the all around fascistization of the capitalist state. Both at home and abroad, U.S. imperialism's program of fascism and war has been carried out in the name of “freedom and democracy,” as well as in the name of “stopping the spread of communism;” “fighting international terrorism,” etc., etc.

6) The whole historical development of the capitalist state in the U.S. as well as the centuries-long struggle of the people for democratic liberties and genuine equality shows that the capitalist class in the U.S. today is completely reactionary, hell-bent on denying the masses even elementary democratic rights and liberties.

History also shows that the working class alone is the true defender and representative of democracy and democratic liberties. Today it is imperative that the working class carries forward the democratic struggles to win full equality for the downtrodden and oppressed national minorities, the struggle for full equality for women, the popular movement against imperialist war and militarism and the struggle against growing fascism and in defense of democratic liberties.

History shows that democratic rights and liberties can only be won against the will and power of the capitalist state, through the independent political movement of the working class and popular masses. This has been confirmed countless times in the historic battles of the workers to improve their wages and living conditions and to band together into trade unions, as well as by the revolutionary struggles of the black and other oppressed minorities for full democratic rights, by the anti-imperialist struggles, etc., etc.

7) The working class not only places itself in the forefront of the general democratic movement but it also struggles to turn the promise of democracy – which is the promise of real social and economic equality – into reality by advancing its own proletarian democratic demands. These demands challenge the rights and prerogatives of capital. The movement for the 8-hour day was such a movement as were the mass struggles which aimed at winning social insurance, pensions and other vital needs. Today, the demand that the government fulfill its responsibility to fund social programs embodies the minimum democratic program of the workers which aims at winning their elementary economic rights, including the right to a secure job or livelihood commensurate with our country's high degree of development.

The democratic aspirations and movement of the workers can only achieve final victory through the proletarian socialist revolution which overthrows the capitalist state and replaces it with a state of the workers, of the laboring class which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the society. Winning the battle for democracy means winning the state power. Through the new proletarian state the working class will be able to abolish private capitalist property in the means of production and carry through the all-around socialist transformation of society based on the social ownership of the means of production. (to be continued...)

Barack Obama and the Government Must be Held Accountable for the Bloodthirsty Practice of “Extraordinary Rendition”

There is a difference between capturing civilians from a foreign country, absolving one’s country of compliance with the Geneva Conventions, spitting on centuries-old traditions like Habeas Corpus, burying the victim’s pleas for freedom for two entire presidential administrations on the one hand, and, on the other, codifying such Medieval atrocities into the supreme political power of the land. All of the above must also be laid at the doorstep of Barack Obama.

When Barack Obama let the world know that he would apply his pragmatism to the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay by shipping them off to other prisons, he once again used arbitrary power to suppress any discussion of the issue – to suppress any discussion of the necessity to release the victims, admit guilt, and provide them compensation for the crime of caging them in the first place.

No, Barack Obama never denied that he did all this in service of continuing the practice of “extraordinary rendition” in the future.

Barack Obama worsened the grave sin of the U.S. government as well, when he continually provided guidelines and justifications for the deeds of the government even while loudly proclaiming that those who disagree could only be “propagandists.”

But with his choice of the term “propagandist,” Barack Obama did accidentally hit on one truth. The millions and millions and millions of Americans and the millions and millions and millions of people throughout the world who oppose the fascist atrocities of U.S. imperialism are indeed “propagandists.” We are propagandists for the end to U.S. imperialism’s racist violence against the workers and oppressed peoples of the world. We are propagandists for a world of peace and friendship based on the recognition, in practice, of the sovereign equality of all nations and peoples – including for the right to secession for the Native peoples, the people of Puerto Rico and other oppressed nations. We are propagandists for the institution of binding restraints on the U.S. government’s power to act as world policeman, tearing down the entire edifice of international law, and imposing its fascist doctrine of Might Makes Right. We are propagandist for recognition on a mass scale that what is missing from our country is the role of people as the creators, shapers and decision-makers of their own social environment.

We say that Barack Obama and the government must be held accountable. We demand an end to the arbitrary arrest and persecution of people because of their national origin or beliefs. We call on people everywhere to stand against such crimes of bigotry and revenge.

Help Build the Mass Workers' Press!

In our view, the day-to-day work of broadening and deepening the content of the mass workers' press and expanding its circulation is vital to creating the conditions for the rise of the mass independent working class and popular political movement.

Why do we say this?

When we analyze the real political situation in the U.S. today, we come up with one, irresistible, relentless conclusion. And that is that all the objective conditions demand fundamental social change, demand the transition from capitalism to socialism, but the subjective conditions are lagging behind.

What does this mean? It means that the economic, political, and social project of capitalism has long ago exhausted itself and today, rather than being able to provide a perspective, a future for our country, monopoly capitalism is imposing an extremely reactionary, anti-social agenda on the people.

What is the economic program of capitalism today? It is the program of criminalizing the poor and most vulnerable, insisting that their poverty and oppression are the “wages of sin.” It is the program of directly relying on the state to plunder our country of its natural assets. The capitalist economic program is a program of withdrawing social investments on every front, from health care to education to Social Security. It is a program of turning public resources and the social sectors of the economy over to the private capitalist exploiters. It is a program which declares that the people have no rights, and that the only aim of society and government is to insure the power and privilege of private property in the means of production.

For the workers, this means new and more intense forms of exploitation – the slashing of wages and benefits, the elimination of full-time jobs and the widespread use of part-time and/or temporary workers, the gutting of the few labor laws which provide certain minimum protections and standards for the workers, such as workers compensation, unemployment insurance, etc.

And what is politics of monopoly capitalism? Behind the public facade of diversion and spectacle, the real politics of monopoly capital is the politics of arbitrary rule . . .

Today, capitalist politics, because it represents outdated and backward social relations, has nowhere to go except to become more openly against the people. That is why the mass disgust with the Democrats and Republicans is growing and can only continue to grow.

But still we cannot really see the reactionary character of present-day capitalism until we look into what it is suppressing.

The Workers Party has long pointed out that today, all the conditions exist for bringing an end to the historical era in which human existence remains dominated by the struggle for economic survival. We have shown that all the conditions exist for humankind to take a huge leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. Yet capitalism is preventing this revolution from taking place. In purely economic terms, the capitalist relations of private ownership of the means of production are holding back and suppressing the socialized productive forces, based on the cooperative labor of tens of millions of working people. But more than this, capitalism is suppressing the very social character of human existence.

And it is this which is demanding recognition. At its very foundation, today's society is based on collective efforts and collective life. Go to New York or Los Angeles and the people there do the same work, face the same problems and have the same aspirations for social change as we do. No matter how much propaganda the capitalists do, insisting that society is only a collection of individuals, no matter how much propaganda is done to claim that there is no such thing as human solidarity and collective aims, we can see that irresistibly the GM workers, the railroad workers, the U.S. West workers, etc., come out together in the struggle for their rights. And moreover, we can see that the whole working class and people support them because they face the same problems. Countless examples – from the women's movement, from the struggles of the oppressed nationalities, from the youth, can be given to show that nothing can prevent people from organizing themselves and coming out as collectives. What is more, the
entire experience of the Workers Party is that the deepest thing in the hearts of the people is the aspiration to live in a society which recognizes, in practice, the equality and rights of all human beings, and in which the people themselves are the sovereign creators and builders of society.

The future of our country lies with the political project that arises from the collective life of the people. So when we say that the subjective conditions are lagging behind, we are saying that the one and only task is to assist in developing the consciousness, organization and independent program of these collectives and of the people as a whole. In other words, the demand of social development is that the workers and people take the destiny of our country in their own hands. The need is to create a new political unity amongst the American people, a political unity based on a program of taking our country through the 21st century on the high road of progress, on the road of the emancipation of the people.

In the contemporary world, only a revolutionary politics – a politics which arises from the real interests of the working class and broad masses of people, a politics which unites and empowers people to fight for the profound economic and social transformations demanded by the very development of society – only such a politics can inspire and mobilize the people.

The mass workers' press has come into being and is developing precisely as part of the movement of the workers and people to create these subjective conditions, to organize themselves and come out as an independent force. Its task is to be a collective voice for the people, to unite the workers on the basis of their own class aims and agenda, and to mobilize the broadest sections around a pro-social agenda which opens the path for progress.

It is extremely important to grasp that the starting point of the workers' press is political; our press is not, as some people may think, simply an instrument for illumination or ideological discussion. Our press is a means for the political mobilization of the people, openly contending with the capitalists over the vital issues of the day, and showing people how to take an active role in the struggle for their interests.

Such a politics must be concrete. It is not enough to declare loyalty to socialism and to merely try to convert people to such a doctrine. A concrete politics is a politics which addresses the concerns of the masses and the demands of social development.

The Campaign for Economic Rights (CER) is such a politics, not only because the capitalists have thrown down the gauntlet and are slashing vital social investments, privatizing the social sectors of the economy and insisting that the workers have no rights except to be exploited by the capitalists, but also because social development has reached the point where human beings need no longer be enslaved by economic necessity – by a continuous battle to secure the minimums of existence.

The politics of democratic renewal is such a concrete politics not only because monopoly capital has completely excluded the people from participation in political life and there is mass disgust and alienation from the political process, but also because the whole course of history in the last few hundred years is the people coming into the political arena and asserting their role as decision-makers and creators of the society they live in.

The program for a democratic foreign policy is such a politics not only because U.S. imperialism, on the basis of the fascist logic that “Might Makes Right,” has declared itself the sole superpower and seeks to dictate the affairs of all the nations and people, but also because the profound democratic, anti-imperialist aspirations of the American people lead us to join the peoples everywhere in creating a world of peace and friendship.

Through the mass workers' press, our Party is continuously developing this concrete politics and contending with the capitalists over the fundamental issues facing our country. Whether the issue is militarism and war or monopoly capital's plan to privatize Social Security and further cut Medicare and Medicaid, or the growing strike movement, the workers and their party are not only mobilizing the opposition but politicizing people in the true sense – pointing to the commonality of their interests – and putting forward a program of solutions.

The decisive issue in building the mass workers' press is that its politics is based on fundamentals, on the general class interests of the workers. Again and again, we must bring to the forefront the problems which must be solved, and inspire the workers and people to organize themselves for solutions by coming into the political arena on the basis of their own aims and agenda. Fighting unswervingly and with limitless energy for this independent politics is the key to uniting the people and opening the path for the progress of our country. Diversions and fads come and go but reality – the need for fundamental social change, remains.